“Gama 13? That is that new ultra secret Spider battleship hulk base attached to some kind of carbon bubble from a Spider Battleship that blew up. Something about Captain Turner the hero with a bunch of ex enemy slaves developing weapons for the Republic there. Didn’t Captain Turner have to kill a surviving Spider Battleship last month or something when a whole Wing of Destroyers could not?”
“Yes. Quite an accomplishment for the young Captain. But how did you find out. I had to go around Security. Vice Admiral Ditzen is part of a group of Officers that is saying that the Captain is lying and that he did not destroyed the enemy ships he says he has and has turned traitor harboring enemy battleships trying to find The Rock. That the Battleships along with the Alien slaves including captured Republic crewmen and anyone in contact with them should be eliminated to protect The Rock. He has evidentially found enough likeminded Captains to follow him in the attempt. No doubt he thinks that once they are eliminated that his flag will be returned to him. I need to confirm my facts before I go to the Supreme Admiral with the plot and his and the other ships desertions.”
“Ok Frank. What kind of fool goes up against live Spider Battleships with only 8 battleships after the fleet was decimated only 7 months ago by these same battleships without a single enemy battleship being damaged by our guns according to the secret official records?” Shaking his head. “I know Ditzen and he is to damn chicken shit to do any such thing.”
“A fool that knows that Captain Turner actually did destroy the Battleships he and the recordings say he did and is just looking to take Turners place in a bid for fame and promotions.” Admiral Halsey said disgustedly. “He thinks 8 battleships is plenty to take out one little armed transport that is still being repaired.”
“With 480 guns to the transports 12. Ya he probably can.” The Commandant said shaking his head.
“Actually no they can’t. Captain Turner already had upgraded his weapons with Spider technology when he took on the enemy Battleships destroying them in the cloud and has added two more ships to his fleet and probably refurbished the enemy Battleships weapons by now. The 8 Republic Battleships and your 4 Assault Transports as well as any marines in them don’t stand a chance once shooting starts and I believe someone higher up the food chain knows this and is hopping that they will be destroyed so they can use that as an excuse to say that Captain Turner really is lying and there is an enemy squadron at Gama 13 trying to find The Rock to justify replacing Supreme Admiral Eisenhower and sending the whole fleet to wipe out Turner and the ex-slaves.” Admiral Halsey shook his head. “I need your help proving that there is a plot and finding who that Admiral is before Admiral Eisenhower is replaced and our only chance of quickly developing superior weapons to the Spider Fleet, destroyed.”
“Four Assault transports you say. Damn. I let Generals Meyers and Shitsu take 4 Assault Transports and their divisions to do practice assaults on mining stations on the other side of the Black Dwarf just to get rid of them and their bellyaching about that damn station and the enemy slaves. Now you say they are on some damn unauthorized attack mission on the Gamma 13 Station and those same slaves?” The Commandant turned red as he spoke and slapped his Comm. “Captain, I want contact with the Assault ships I sent to the other side of the Black Dwarf on my screen immediately along with General Meyers and General Shitsu if they are still in the system. Start getting a squadron of long range recon attack boats ready to chase those ships down if we don’t receive an answer before they are ready to launch and send recon drones to the ship construction and maintenance yards and all the outlaying docks. I want a full sensor photo of every outside dock on this Rock in one hour. And include all the emergency landing pits around the rock as well even if it will take some 6 hours to get to them all.”
“But Commandant that will require more drones than we have on standby. We will have to take them out of storage and...”
“I don’t care just do it or use manned fighters. I want those ships found if they are anyplace on the surface of this Rock or in this system.” Turning to Admiral Halsey as he tapped off the Comm. “We will have squads at every airdock and construction cavern in an hour just in case they are not in the outside docks they are supposed to be in. We will also be going to the Officers shore quarters to question relatives. We will also have every Security office and installation locked down in two hours. Command decks are already being locked down as we speak with reinforcements arriving in about an hour or before, depending on how long it takes for me to decide how many Generals I can count on and who I have to sack.” Taking a deep breath as he frowned. “I have been expecting troubles with all the wild talk going around The Rock but I was not expecting this. Can you tell me anymore about what you know and how you found out about what is going on Admiral? None of that are in the latest dispatches coming into The Rock.”
“I can only tell you that a new top secret slave and human invented untraceable communications device has allowed the Gamma station to contact me with the details of the Vice Admirals attack.” The Admiral tapped his desks for a few seconds as he watched another screen. “We will know in a few minutes if the station survives as well as the Battleships and Assault transports. The Vice Admiral is refusing to comply with Republic standard identification protocols when approaching a military station. Trying to bluff his way into range without acknowledging them as friendly. Possible trying to keep the other battleships of his little squadron from opening Comms with the Station that would prove that they are friendly and not spider Battleships.” Halsey said as he watched the Hulk Battleship rapidly approaching the Gama 13 sector Transport Station the Vice Admiral Bingamton had slapped the name Hulk on before they had lost Comms. It looked like they were trying to ram the stern of both ships together. He just hoped they did manage to dock properly or Ditzen would be given an easy victory.
“Captain Turner. This is Captain Glenn. We fucked up the drag calculations and used the amount of mass exhaust English engines would create instead of the exslave God tech engines we have and the squadron will exit the corridor a fraction of a second before you will dock, from our readings of your current deceleration. Sorry Captain for fucking it up.”
“That is alright Captain, at least we should manage to dock in one piece with a second to spare if we can get that last engine running. Just turn away from the station when you exit the corridor and get that ship and your refugees back in the cloud and safety. I don’t want you getting between us and those ships just in case we have to fire on them. Or hell, even a stray shot hitting you and the Refugees. Fact is you can follow your orders early and start heading for the martialing point and wait for survivors. Then head for Earth if things go badly here and tell them what happened here.”
Admiral Halsey turned back to the Marine Commandant. “This Comm is Top secret Quinten and the information I have given you that an attack is taking place will not be general knowledge for as long as a month with all Comms having to go through repeaters scattered through the cloud. That means I cannot give you the outcome of the battle. You will have to conduct your investigation in the dark as to the outcome for now. Depending on what you find, I will add to that information at a later date as we figure out what to do next and what the Supreme Admiral decides. For now proving that the Vice Admiral and those ships and crews are not in The Rock’s system before I go to Eisenhower is all we can do unless you find a smoking gun. Good luck. Out.”
Halsey looked at the Hippy in front of his desk. “Zoote you better be right about this Comm being impossible to trace or I will be executed for disobeying a Prime Directive.”
“I have isolated the transmitter and antenna from the systems on the station both Spider and Human. The beam cannot be intercepted or detected unless you are within a few feet of its 20 foot wide beam. Do you wish to talk to Captain Turner?”
“Hell no, that would not only shock the kid into making a mistake right now, but alert everyone that we have a new secret Comm system that works. That is until it is destro
yed with the station in a few minutes. But that can’t be helped. Is the information you sent include this new Comm tech?”
“Yes Admiral. It does not require any major advancements and can be mass produced in a matter of weeks at The Rock. It will allow every ship in the fleet to contact every other ship including The Rock no matter where they are in the Republic if the Range equations are valid. All you have to know is where who you want to talk to is at within a mile or two depending on range for the beam to find the receiver.”
“Good.” The Admiral said. “But I don’t see that being needed for the average ship and will probably be restricted to only Command ships that not only need to talk to The Rock and even Earth reliably but can be certain they are destroyed if the ship is captured.” The Admiral watched the ships approaching the moment of truth. Feeling compelled to watch the inevitable Train Wreck. “Make sure you send every detail of the battle until the Station is destroyed. Even an enemy battleship should not be able to survive a couple hundred of the Republic’s new Blackhole torpedoes at point blank range.”
The Admiral bowed his head in sorrow. “The shame is that Captain Turner had a hand in designing the new torpedo warheads as well as the torpedo engines that are as likely to take his life as the new 18 inch guns. If the damn ass hole Ditzen fires all his tubes along with his guns as close as they are, enough are bound to get through to take out both battleships. I just hope the Red Pepper and the other refugee ships stay in the cloud and run afterwards. Make sure they head for Transport Supply Base Victory Prime. It is my best defended base that is independent from Battleship Command and should be able to protect them. I just wish I had gone ahead and used the Gama 13 entrance Station as a storage base even if it was out of the way of all our major trade routes in and out of the cloud. That ass hole would not have dared what he is trying.”
Taking a breath as the squadron came closer to the corridor’s entrance and the Bounty left the corridor and turned away from the station as ordered. “Keep recording even after the station is destroyed. I am going to have to use your recordings to defend Captain Turner or the refugees whether he dies or not in the enquiry later so don’t lose them. The Republic does not take kindly to its Admirals destroying Republic ships and their crews no matter what the reason is. It is going to be very important who fires first though the problem is that at close combat, the first ship to lock onto the enemy target and fire, is usually the winner. But like you said, if Jack fires first he would win but be executed for murdering the Republic ships and their crews. A no win situation. I am going to have a heart attack waiting to see which way it goes.”
Zoote zipped a signal finger over to call the paramedics to stand by in his outer office just in case. Not knowing if the Admiral was just joking or serious. It was not worth taking a chance as stressful as the next few minutes were going to be. She even found herself activating more and more of her processors and super charging her finger cores around The Rock for no apparent reason. They were certainly not needed but she could not stop herself. Her defensive subroutines were kicking in even though there was no reason for them to.
Needing to do something she tried to access the 8 ships in the Squadron in an attempt to keep them from firing on the station and the transports but was quickly kicked out from each of the AI’s. But each time she had managed to stay in long enough to gather enough pieces to put together what was going on. She did not like what she saw.
-------------------------
Jack glanced at the engineering screen that showed the one engine still not working. No matter what they did they could not get it to run properly. Even with the squadrons’ best engineers running over to help they still could only get no more than a few burps from the damn thing that was threatening to blow up instead of run right. With less than a minute left until docking one engine no longer mattered. “Enough. Prepare to jettison the Destroyers. I will not take them down with us.”
“Captain we have one second of leeway and should stop some 40 feet from the other ship if you have to. Docking should be easy even with one engine none operational.”
Jack glanced back at the engineering screen again. “DD 1704 has one engine showing problems. If we lose it to in the next minute we will hit hard enough to damage both ships, making it impossible to dock. We will drift away with no time to make repairs and dock. The destroyers could also be thrown down into the other ship destroying them since their cradles are not designed for those stresses. I want you to jettison them away from the ship just before we hit no matter how hard we are going to hit.” Taking a deep breath as sweat ran down his face. “Pan how are we lined up?”
“Perfectly in line and parallel faces. Doing good Captain.”
“Thirty seconds to dock Captain.” Said the tactical officer.
“Are we still behind the Squadron?”
“Yes sir by one second. 15 seconds to dock.”
“No!” Screamed Pan. “We have somehow rotated 43 degrees to Port Captain. We have to rotate back or the fingers won’t engage the leg locks. They will hit the flat armor and destroy them. You would have to weld the ships together which will take hours. None of the attachment service lines and passageways would line up even if we don’t bounce off. We have to rotate back to dock properly.”
Jack hit the rotational thrusters as well as the maneuvering thrusters to slow the station down but with half of them still not operational, the ship not only was slow to rotate but the miss matched thrusters started to push the ship out of alignment with the Station. Forcing Jack to hit other thrusters trying to maintain the alignment.
“Ten seconds Captain. No, the ship is slowing to stop short.” Said the tactical officer.
“30 degrees off rotation and coming around. A tenth of a degree off of center and one hundredth of a degree from parallel faces.
“Five seconds Captain.”
“Ten degrees dropping. Still off center 15 feet and returning. South side 5 feet too close.”
“3 seconds to full stop Captain. 100 feet distance from station.”
“Five degrees rotation and closing.”
“One second and ...”
Jack brought the throttles up slowly as he hit the thrusters to stop the rotation with the docking fingers not quite lined up.
Jack pulled the throttles off in one smooth motion while still hitting the side thrusters.
“Sixty feet and closing 3 seconds to dock at 10...”
“South side now 3 feet to close.”
“Squadron leaving corridor.”
“Thirty feet… we are not perfectly aligned Captain. 2 seconds.”
Jack continued hitting the side thrusters as the main destroyer engines at low power continued to slow the ship.
“Ten feet. One second. Enemy squadron entering the Bubble’s void.”
“Squadron turning to head over the station. They are ignoring orders to halt but are not headed for the station.”
Jack shoved the throttles all the way up giving the ship a short burst of deceleration and as the velocity meter approached inches a second. Jack heard a distant bang and jerked the throttles off as the destroyers suddenly went flying away from the sides of the Battleship.
Clangs started echoing through the ship rapidly getting faster and faster as locking lights on the screen for each of the hundred docking clamps went from red to green. One by one in a cascade. Finally the last docking finger light turned green and a loud sound of gears could be heard from one side of the Battleship.
Jack looked around at Pan.
“Just the lock legs pulling our ship into the other ship while finishing the final alignments for the hard dock. Should only take a minute or two. This is a much bigger ship with a lot of armor massed at the other end. But it looks like you did a very good job Captain. Even the God Officers would have let you live.”
Jack closed his eyes with relief as he wiped the sweat from his forehead with his arm.
“Captain, the squadron is stopping over the top of the stati
on 500 miles out.”
--------------------
Zoot noticed pathways in the Battleship Stations Comm to the Battleship’s defensive weapons. Slipping into the strange firing controls and targeting sensors she found a mass of over written code with dead ends and gates using stupidly complex reasoning and orders that contradicted other orders and programs and immediately started deleting and rewriting the targeting codes for all the defensive weapons on the Battleship not a Base Station. She also noticed that the Stations monster Battleship guns were none operational even though they were tracking the squadron. She realized that it was a bluff. Fearing that all the weapons across the Battleship Station were bluffs as well since they had not been fired across the bow of the Squadron for maximum effect. She threw her processors into overdrive to find out. It became obvious that the Station was going to have to defend itself.
She increased the power of the lasers of her processors to speed up the recoding. Then a pathway opened up to the other battleship after reprograming the turret to turret comm system to enable them to work together. Dumping her directly into the turret control systems of the other Battleship that now made up the Base Station. Again she went to work transferring her upgrades to the second ship while wiping the moronic codes from the systems.
The problem was the defensive weapons for both Battleships were down until she finished what should have been quick and easy but was taking longer and longer for her to complete even with her starting to overclocked her processors as the job kept growing with the hundreds of weapons that were programed with code hundreds and even thousands of years apart depending on when the weapon was produced or last worked on. With 90% of the weapons code trying to fix problems with conflicts with older codes and programs added over the centuries.
She increased the overclock speed of her processors again and they started heating up. Even relatively cold laser light driven processors that normally did not need cooling would build up heat when the beams power was increased by factors of 10 to overclock the processors. Processors that were quickly building up heat they could not get rid of, threatening to burn her whole core out. But she continued adding more and more power trying to finish in time. Finish in time to save the Republic from a stupid fools power grab as the targeting sensors from the Battleship Squadron hit the Battleship Station. Upping the power yet again the automatic safety circuit breakers finally kicked in and shut the core down with her still in it. The hundreds of Point Defense turrets and missile launchers of what was now a Basestation were completely inoperable. The Attack sensors of 8 Republic Battleships were now targeting the Base Station at full power.
Battleship Destroyer 2 (Battleship Destoryer) Page 65
